Alright alright, I'll get you the moon you wanted.

Not to mention imagemagick. I can often get ffmpeg to more or less do what I want on the first try, but imagemagick always results in a second try after reading the documentation for the 938th time.

For the magick stuff I do all the time (you all know what it is) I prepared a script. I wrote it probably a couple of years ago by this point and even if you held a gun to my head and I had it open in the text editor in front of me I couldn't explain to you what all the flags and arguments actually do.

ffmpeg is always funny to me, because it feels like you could convert anything into anything, if you just knew the right flags, but 99% of my use is extracting a clip out of a video file.

And the command for that is in my shell history, so I wouldn't know the flags either. ¯\_(⊙ʖ⊙)/¯

I just remember running the coolest ffmpeg command many years ago, I don't remember the actual command, but it rendered th video as ascii art

I got it, mostly... The various filter chains, not so much. But I can map input streams and set dispositions and metadata, and know a bunch of svtav1 passthru params by heart; with enough experience to set pretty decent crf/preset/filmgrain-synth settings by eyeballing the input (ofc specifics depends on the video encoder and whether or not I'm using something like the psyex/hdr fork...)

Some people look at this as wizardry, but it's really not too hard once to get the hang of ordered arguments... Like whether or not you put -ss before or after -i changes the seeking behavior.... Okay, it's a little wizardry.

Ffmpeg is tough but you should strive to openssl.

Lemmy got an Ai hate boner but this is the first thing zi ever really used it for that wasn't research. "Give me the corrct ffmpeg command for _ and explain every flag concisely."